Kudu should be everywhere. As should springbok. The meat of these two magnificent wild beasts is superb to eat, low in fat, high in protein and tender. Both meats take to sweetness and spice, and can stand up to pungent flavours such as a good, stinky blue cheese of the kind that is quite liable to crawl on to the plate of its own accord if you’ve left it to mature for long enough.
Cook
How to braai a cow but not your friends
Here’s a thought. The debate about whether Heritage Day in South Africa should be called Heritage Day or Braai Day is easily resolved. Let’s just call it National Braai Heritage Day, and all boxes are ticked, and sommer make Jan Braai president for a day while we’re about it.
Cook
Treat the braai as a tandoor
Animals, says South Africa’s reigning braai guru, Jan Braai, eat grass, leaves and vegetables which they then convert to meat. Now this is a tremendously wise saw, and makes perfect sense. To take this wisdom to its logical conclusion, then, one must urge all vegetarians to adopt a meat diet at once to ensure that they get all that wonderful vegetable nutrition.
Restaurants
Gulls and Seafood at the Plettenberg
For many years the restaurant here was called Sand, but considering how much less of that is now evident through the windows, perhaps it makes sense that a few weeks ago the venue was given a lift, a shake-up, a new name and a new menu.
Cook
Avocado Savoy and Long Street madams
My friends over at Posh Galore haven’t featured in this column for a while, but I’m sure they would frown upon the thought of me dredging up a hasbeen old kitchen favourite again, on this dubious occasion the sadly lamented “Avocado Ritz”.
Cook
Life’s a beech-smoked pork loin
The thing about beech-smoked pork loin is that it has a decidedly bacony flavour, if not texture. The texture of the flesh is nothing at all like bacon, and also is not much like a slow-roasted slab of pork belly, which it closely resembles. But it has far less fat than an equivalent sized piece of pork belly, and with the subtle smoking it attains a flavour more reminiscent of your end-of-year hunk of Christmas gammon than it does anything else.
Beef
Adding salt to the great curry debate
At such gatherings inevitably there will be somebody who insists that a curry should never be salted, and I generally shut up and leave them to drone on about it, while being tempted to say, “Why don’t you just taste the curry you’ve made and your palate will give you the answer?”
Cook
The Alcoholic Word Police strike again
There are still millions of people who continue to call sparkling wine Champagne because they really couldn’t be bothered about a silly rule imposed by the Alcoholic Word Police. What are they going to do, arrest them? And who could police it anyway? Shall we tell our already overworked police, “Sersant, just drop that murder you’re rushing to, we’ve got a serious case at a party in Sea Point of a lady offering her guests Champagne when quite clearly what she is pouring for them is South African sparkling wine, and that’s not all – it’s not even a methode Cap Classique, it’s cheap s***. Bring her in.”
Cook
Steak your claim to a mushroom
I wouldn’t steak my career on this, but a steak is a slab of beef, nothing more, nothing less. But suddenly you can have steak almost anything. Big slab of lamb? Lamb steak. Great hunk of mushroom? It’s a steak.
Cook
Sense-sharpening Durban coconut curry
Durban has an electric sense of something about to happen. It’s like that feeling in the air before a tropical storm breaks. You can sense it coming, Your forearms tingle. Your back tenses. Your senses sharpen. Come on, admit it: when last did you feel like that in Cape Town?
